Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/77

Beam Pool a sweet and liquid cry. The curlews, which were feeding with their young flown from the moors where they were born, were disturbed by something, and had cried the alarm. Tarka had heard curlews crying during many nights, but never before in such a way. He heard thuds in the ground; and from the river the warning whistle of his mother.

Remembering what had come with the ground thuds before, when the air of the hollow tree had shaken to the baying of hounds, Tarka ran swiftly to water. The otter had left the river and was standing on the bank, sniffing the night wind. A cloud like the seal of an otter drifted across the moon. Tarka slipped into the river, but returned to his mother, being curious. The alarm cries of the curlews had ceased, and other notes fell from the sky. In the riverside sedges two warblers began to speak to one another. They mixed hastily the notes of song and alarm, with the gentle under-song voice used only to their mates when brooding in the cradles woven to the green flags.

A low sound of a human voice came to Tarka, and a hound-like taint which raised the hair of his neck. Immediately the mother 3dkkered a threat, and with her cubs ran down the bank and hid among the sedges. Clouds hid the shine of the moon.

On the bank, dark against the sky, appeared the figures of men, and a long-legged lurcher dog. The men scrambled down to the river’s verge. There was a moment of quiet, when the trilling cries of the fl3ring curlews rose above the water-murmurs and the wind in the trees.